For Election Day 2010
We burn cities.
With your permission
the only animal that runs toward fire
to save, to gawk, to liven up the night,
cancels with fire the quick networks of borders.
I celebrate, with your permission, the borders
of human beings, the profiles lifting and turning
in drivers’ seats, the parallels that bend
and meet at the tear ducts of the eye.
No longer frightened of fontanels,
I touch the soft craters of the mind cap
and root my nose gratefully in whorls
of babies’ ears. I celebrate the skin,
the curves of women, the straight hips of men,
my hand with its own life
and tiny Pavlovian memories
of cusps in the arms of chairs and handkerchiefs
drawn like cold brooks through the fingers.
I sing the damaged hands of les Eyzies,
and Friday’s footprint,
triangles in tempera of the holy.
As over the hump of windowsill more evening
crawls, I contemplate full moons
of countdown, after nine of which we come
with hanks of cord trailing from our bellies.
I celebrate, with your permission, the bellies,
the treasure kegs of aging males,
big bodies coming out of showers,
and the taut ramparts of little girls.
The approaching sine curve of an elbow
gazed at and touched by a pregnant woman,
I gaze at, and also touch, then sing
the double string between the eyes of lovers.
Faces, known and unknown, delineate
like the moon suddenly in breaks of cloud.
I celebrate and sing
all the beloved faces, all, MOAB,
and tickle the cittern for the cloud as well.
I wave as if positioned for goodbye
and, at the same time, for hello
in the borderless shadow of the lingam.
– Henry Braun
I was thinking of having my class analyze this. Good thing I read it until the end. You might want to put a “Warning: Sexual References” somewhere, because they certainly would have had fun looking the last word up on the internet.